directed by Paul Greengrass
written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse
Whatever one feels about Universal Pictures' Bourne series of films starring Matt Damon, one cannot deny that it has been a remarkable action movie franchise. Each film has earned more at the box office than the last, and has gotten better reviews than the last. Their hot streak broke a few years back when neither director Paul Greengrass, who helmed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum nor star Matt Damon was interested in making a new film, and Universal unwisely decided to make a spin-off/sequel hybrid with then "it boy" Jeremy Renner playing a different character, albeit one similarly conditioned as Jason Bourne. That film was not well received critically or commercially, and the studio was at a loss as to where to go next.
Fortunately for Universal, Greengrass finally decided a year or two ago that he was interested in giving the franchise another go, and with Damon in tow they proceeded to make the first movie featuring Jason Bourne in nearly a decade entitled, aptly enough, Jason Bourne.
It's been several years since the events of The Bourne Ultimatum (with the events in The Bourne Legacy spinoff having been conveniently ignored) and former amnesiac assassin for the Central Intelligence Agency Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) is spending his days as a bare-knuckle boxer somewhere in Greece. Meanwhile, his erstwhile colleague and fellow CIA operative gone rogue Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) has unearthed a chilling new black-ops program of the CIA involving online invasion of privacy that could be even worse than the one that created Jason Bourne. In hacking into the system, Parson has put herself in the crosshairs of the CIA, now headed by Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) with the help of IT wizard Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander). She also learns crucial information about the only person she knows who could blow this whole thing wide open: Jason Bourne, whom she tracks down in Greece. Unfortunately, that puts him in the CIA's sights as well, particularly a rather nasty assassin with a score to settle (Vincent Cassel). Bourne's a bit older, and considerably more world weary, but this time he has good reason to come in out of the cold: this time it's personal.
As much as I have enjoyed all of the Bourne films prior to this one, I have to admit they all follow a very similar narrative structure: Bourne unearths a mystery that involves his past with the CIA, fights through a bunch of throwaway CIA agents, including at least one "boss battle" (in the first one, there were two), gets involved in a lengthy car chase, then manages to ruin the big bad guy without his fists. It's a perfect balance of exposition and action, a formula from which the last film, the one without Jason Bourne in it deviated, for which they paid dearly.
Well, with the return of Greengrass, Damon and Jason Bourne to the series after a one-film and nine-year hiatus, we also see a return of the old formula, complete with the mystery, the boss battle and the car chase, albeit in a slightly different order, and to be honest, for the most part, I didn't mind. It was the cinematic equivalent of eating comfort food.
The thing is, while Greengrass still has serious action storytelling chops and while Damon still has the edginess that made Bourne such a watchable character, I could not get around how tacked on this movie felt. For example, the given reasons for Bourne getting back "in the game," especially considering how neatly The Bourne Ultimatum tied up the trilogy felt a tad forced. Basically, Greengrass (who co-wrote this film with film editor Christopher Rouse) retroactively gave Bourne yet another axe to grind against the CIA. I'm also not sure I really care for the subtext behind that particular plot device. Are the writers suggesting that Bourne won't do anything to stop the CIA (which has a particularly insidious scheme in this film) if it doesn't somehow involve tidbits of his past?
Not only that, but as gratifying as the action sequences are, they definitely have a been-there-done-that feel to them. Greengrass's fight scenes still pack a wallop and Damon looks great, even at 45, but really, after Gareth Evans' The Raid films, the Russo brothers' Captain America movies and even Netflix's Daredevil series took bone-crunching hand-to-hand action to another level, the onus was on the Bourne crew to step things up a bit as well. They didn't do their fight scenes any favors by having several of the sequences semi-obscured by darkness, including a climactic fight scene. The "boss battles" in the first three Bourne movies still stand out for me, especially since they were all filmed in daylight.
Finally, Greengrass and company approach the requisite car chase with somewhat uncharacteristic bombast and excess, the sort of over-the-top, illogical approach one would see in a Michael Bay movie. The chase in Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity, involving a Mini Cooper and the streets of Paris, was so well-done that it compares favorably to such classic car-chase scenes as those in Ronin or The French Connection. The chase here, set along the Las Vegas strip and which features an armored truck which is more like a cross between a Lamborghini and a tank, looks like it came out of a Transformers movie and, unbelievably enough, actually manages to take too long. My 14-year-old son, a huge fan of the series who has seen every one of the original films on DVD at least twice, fell asleep during the chase, and while I did not doze off (at least not during that particular sequence), I cannot say I blame him.
The performances, fortunately, are generally good. Damon and Stiles, the only veterans from the original films, slip quite comfortably into their roles again, and I was grateful that, in a day and age in which digital de-aging and botox are all the rage, the actors wear their wrinkles quite prominently. Tommy Lee Jones is, well, Tommy Lee Jones again as he puts a somewhat malevolent spin on his federal marshal from The Fugitive. Vincent Cassel was appropriately stoical as an unnamed CIA asset (I'm serious; in the credits, his character is identified solely as "Asset"), but I have to reiterate that he was totally wasted in the climactic fight scene. I'd known this guy could do impressive onscreen fighting since I saw him in 2000's The Crimson Rivers and 2002's The Brotherhood of the Wolf, and when I read he was cast in this film I was genuinely excited to see his character throw down with Bourne. There was quite a gap, unfortunately, between expectation and the actual product. Alicia Vikander turned in a decent performance as Heather Lee, but as a Swede playing an American she seemed to be struggling with her accent, not completely unlike the way her compatriot Noomi Rapace strained a bit to play an Englishwoman in Prometheus. One performance that stood out for me was that of Riz Ahmend as Aaron Kapoor, a Mark-Zuckerberg-like IT magnate who makes a deal with the devil and is keen to wiggle out of it.
The good news for me is that I think Greengrass and Damon still have a few stories left to tell with this character, and judging from the grosses, it looks like they'll get to tell them. I just hope they feel a little fresher than this one does.
6.4/10
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